Chapter 2: The Business Analyst

About six weeks after the Lumberjack fiasco, I was warily considering dipping my toe into the dating pool once again. I had recovered from the events of the recent past and was beginning to regain my faith in men. So I decide to go out one Saturday night with my friend Shelby. We wanted to go to the Parlor in downtown Bellevue as they have it all: Drinks, Pool and Dancing. It was a fun night, we each grab a drink and start walking over to the dance floor. On the way, we ran into a group of people that we went to high school with. It was some girl’s birthday party, she was fun and kept asking us to dance. Amongst this group were a few guys we didn’t know. And one of them honed in on me.


He introduced himself and told me he had just moved here from Arizona. He mentioned he was a business analyst, he owned his own business, and he had just gotten a 3 bedroom condo in Bellevue. Why this was some of the first information he offered up to me, I’m not sure. Maybe it was to impress me, I don’t know. Either way, we start talking and really hit it off. He was very sweet and kept complimenting me to the point where I was even embarrassed. He came outside with me to have a smoke and asked me if he could take me out sometime. I thought this sounded like a great idea. He told me that he wanted to take me to El Goucho downtown, a fairly reputable place in Belltown that a few of my friends had told me about but I’d never been. He mentioned that his friend’s family owned and ran the place and that he could get us in with no reservations. I told him that sounded nice, but we didn’t have to go someplace so fancy. Still, he insisted. So, the Parlor was starting to get crowded and that group wanted to move up to Bothell to Bert’s Tavern where they knew the bartender (who also happened to be someone we knew from high school). We all hop in our respective cars and head up North. We hang out for most of the evening, but come about 2AM Shelby and I decide to go. We exchanged numbers and I was excited about the potential there. “Well that was a nice surprise for the evening!” I said to Shelby. We both thought he was an ideal guy and it was lucky that we met. So, the very next day he texted me and thus struck up our conversations. We ended up hanging out the next weekend at his step brother's house (which was actually his step-grandmother's house where a few of my of friends used to hang out in high school which was giving me flashbacks!). It was yet another person's birthday and they decided to all go out with a group of people. It was going well...I thought.


We dated for a few more weeks and slowly but surely the “ideal” factor was peeled away like an onion, one layer at a time. The following week he invited me over. "Great!"  I told him, "What's your address?" He said, "you know, you were just here last weekend." I was? "The yellow house in Bothell." My stomach turns as I realize he's referring to his step grandmother's house. I am confused and decided to head over his way to see what's going on. Turns out he didn’t have a three bedroom condo, of which I could have cared less but come on, why lie about it? The bad part was, instead he was living in his step-grandmother’s basement. Yeah… BUT he said it was because he had just moved a few weeks ago from another state and hadn’t gotten settled, he was in the process of getting his own place, blah blah blah. “Okay” I thought, “don’t be shallow. Give him time to get his stuff together, otherwise he seems like a great guy.” So I did.


A couple of more weeks passed with us going out about once a week. The big test of hanging out with my friends and going out comes around and he passes with flying colors apart from a few minor details. Now, one of my biggest pet peeves is a guy being consistently late. I’m not talking 10 or even 20 minutes, I’m talking at least an hour. Every time. Really. I get all dressed up and excited to go out, get my coat on and my purse in hand and sit on the edge of my seat on the couch. Cut to about 90 minutes later and I'm slumped on my couch, arms crossed, tapping my feet against the coffee table in irritation. FINALLY I head out to my car with my mind made up that I'm leaving without him. Just then he pulls up. Okay, so he was over an hour late, but he offered to be the designated driver so I didn’t have to be which was a nice change of pace from said previous relationship (See chapter 1). So we pick up my friend Tami (my partner in crime!) and head over to our friend Leo’s apartment. We all go out for a night of dancing at the Frontier Room in Belltown. My date was fun, personable and sang openly with me in the car which I LOVE! (Yes, I’m a bit of a karaoke freak, holler!) And it doesn’t hurt that he was very VERY easy on the eyes which is never a requirement for me to date someone, but let’s face it…it doesn’t hurt!


So the night goes well, and for the first time since we’d been hanging out he actually bought me a drink. I had paid my own way for everything prior to this night when we were together, which I really REALLY do not mind because I think it’s old fashioned for guys to pay for everything anyways. But this time it was all on him, even drinks for my friend. As the night ends, he hops in the driver's seat of my car and we head out to leave. We get halfway to my place to drop me off. He all of a sudden starts freaking out. He had forgotten his debit card. We were almost back to my place and I told him he should just go pick it up first thing tomorrow. “You don’t understand” he said, “It is my grandmother’s card…” So, he had to go back and get said card. He said she let him borrow it for groceries and stuff and it wasn’t a big deal. Not sure if she would have seen it that way though, if she wouldn’t mind then why was he so worried about getting it back that same night? I asked him why he would need to use hers, and he said it was because he hadn't found a job yet. When I asked him what was up with his business and the whole "business analyst" thing he acted surprised. "I never said that! I used to clean pools in Arizona." Great. He was a liar and worse than that, he couldn't even remember WHAT he had lied about. Fantastic. We pull back up to the bar, he hops in and gets his grandmother's credit card and gets back into the car. A real winner, I was thinking to myself.  Now I understood why we never made it out to El Goucho.


Anyways, cut to about a week later. We previously had plans to hang out but I had gotten really sick and to be honest I had turned a corner on how I felt about this guy (can't imagine why). He came over for a few minutes and said he had a favor to ask. He needed to borrow $100 and he would pay me back tomorrow. He had some long drawn out story that I neither remember nor care about.  It sounded like he was in a real pinch and he swore up and down that he had a check for $100 that he would cash the next day and give to me. Not sure why I did it, maybe it was the fever making me delirious, maybe because he just looked so very sad sitting on my couch and begging me for money, but I agreed. To his credit, he did come back the next day to drop off some money, but he had “accidentally” spent some of it and he asked me “is that okay?” IS THAT OKAY? Is that a question? I’ve been dating this guy for a month and a half and discovered he was not the man he presented. Instead of a business analyst who had a three bedroom condo in Bellevue and owned his own business, he was an unemployed pool boy from Arizona living in his grandmother's basement. He had fraudulently used his Grandmother's card to finance a night on the town, borrowed money from me, and then spent some of the money he was supposed to pay me back with, and he asks “is that okay?!” No. It was not. I gave him an earful and he acted remorseful, but there really was no coming back from all of this. It was apparent that this was not going to work, and it didn’t take being an Analyst to figure it out.